Screenwriter David Goyer told MTV that Ghost Rider 2, which will be based on a screenplay Goyer wrote several years ago and should start filming sometime next year, won’t be a franchise reboot.  The second Ghost Rider film will be set some eight years after the original and Nicholas Cage is still on board to portray the flame-headed cyclist.  Goyer said compared with the first Ghost Rider film, the sequel will be “stripped down and darker.  It's definitely changing tone. What Casino Royale was to the Bond movies, hopefully this will be to Ghost Rider.”

Goyer told MTV: “This story picks up eight years after the first film. You don't have to have seen the first film. It doesn't contradict anything that happened in the first film, but we're pretending that our audience hasn't seen the first film. It's as if you took that same character where things ended in the first film and then picked it up eight years later—he's just in a much darker, existential place.”

The first Ghost Rider film, which was released in February of 2007, cost $110 million to produce and garnered a worldwide box office gross of $228,738,393.  Ghost Rider also sold some 4.7 million units on DVD, which brought in close to $100 million in additional revenue.  While those figures indicate that the film was in all likelihood slightly profitable (the rule of thumb is that a movie has to earn more than two times its production cost to break even when theater owners’ share of the grosses and promotional costs are factored in), it was no bonanza for Sony.  Still, with the example of Iron Man fresh in their minds (see “Iron Man Rights Revert to Marvel”), the studios that have rights to Marvel properties are now loath to return the rights to those characters to Marvel/Disney, which means that they will keep on making new films featuring the Marvel characters as long as they can.  The Marvel rights deals all have “use it or lose it” clauses and no studio executive wants to be known as someone who let a blockbuster slip through his or her fingers.